"Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?": friends and enemies in Walter Scott's crusader novels.(Critical essay)

THROUGHOUT MOST OF THE PERFORMANCE HISTORY OF THE MERCHANT OF Venice there would have been little or no motive to attend to the line I take here as my title. If the stage is crowded, with Shylock skulking somewhere in the background and Antonio indistinguishable from the other well-dressed gentiles, then the question is merely instrumental: where are the litigants? Perhaps it works also to establish the legal propriety of what is about to happen: plaintiff and defendant are bidden to stand forth before their judge, rendering the assembly both formal and performative. But there would probably be only one Jew, so the incident might be played as a joke; for how is it possible that Portia could possibly not see the difference between the engaging albeit anxious young man on one side of the stage and the bearded, spooky old figure in the black cape and yarmulke on the other?

In recent times we have had a more serious curiosity about Portia's predicament, and more and more occasions to reflect on the similarity in difference that marks Shakespeare's apparent attempt to preserve intact a binary distinction between the Christian and the Jew, the friend and the enemy, the self and the other. In particular, the relation of posited difference that recent and contemporary global-political alliances in the west have sought to maintain between the Jew and the Arab, with the Christian interpellating itself as the author and arbitrator of that difference (between democratic and terrorist/absolutist, friend and enemy, modern and primitive, civilized and barbaric) have been brilliantly investigated by Derrida and (in the spirit of Derrida) by Gil Anidjar, whose work underpins much of what I shall have to say here, and who has resolutely insisted on the west's formative role in creating and exploiting notions of the Arab and the Jew as interchangeable instances of the enemy and therefore structurally identical and interchangeable in the imagination of the west. (1)

Walter Scott knew something of this syndrome. He might also have known something about the interdependence and arguable identity of Shylock and Antonio. In his 1790 edition of Shakespeare, Edmund Malone had noted an English translation of the seventeenth-century Italian historian Gregorio Leti's anecdote of the life of Pope Sixtus v, in which the Pope himself played Portia's role as the judge, and where the threatened debtor was a Jew and the cruel creditor determined on full payment was a Christian. (2) In this version of the story Antonio was the Shylock figure, implacable in his desire for the pound of flesh. There is no evidence that Shakespeare knew of this variant (whose first known publication came well after his death), or that it was true, but it appealed to Maria Edgeworth, who used it in her fascinating philosemitic novel Harrington published in 1817--in other words before Ivanhoe (1819) and Scott's later Crusader tales, The Betrothed and The Talisman (published together in 1825). The debate about the so-called Jew Bill of 1753 and the very public conversion of Lord George Gordon to Judaism, along with a few notorious criminal trials involving Jews, kept the issue of Jewishness very much alive in public and political circles before the French Revolution; thereafter they were inevitably implicated in the "loyalty test" mentality that was directed at all persons who could be associated with the foreign. (3) For the most part they passed it, and somewhat sympathetic literary portraits of Jews were put abroad by Thomas Dibdin and Richard Cumberland, as well as by Byron in his Hebrew Melodies, the product of his cooperation with Isaac Nathan, who had first offered the job to Scott, who declined. (4) Scott was indeed no avowed philosemite, but the popular success of Ivanhoe was significantly owing to its portrait of a complex romantic heroine in the Jewess Rebecca. Michael Ragussis has argued persuasively that both Harrington and Ivanhoe were careful and conscious responses to and rewrites of the plot of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, which had previously functioned in the literary tradition as the embodiment of conventional antisemitism. (5) As such they were also countering the conservative identification of Jews with revolution (virulently apparent in Burke's Reflections in 1790) and, in Scott's case, undermining the myth of racial synthesis and inclusion (always under the rubric of Englishness) put about by the nationalist historians and to some degree in Scott's own other novels, those Which seem to anticipate and celebrate the happy union of England and Scotland after 1707.

The Crusader novels which are the subject of this essay are almost bound to be at least somewhat at odds with the positive modernization narratives of the Waverley novels, if only because they are set in dim and distant times, long before any whiggish justification of commercial and political union between England and Scotland could be argued to have become clearly emergent. The Talisman, indeed, can be seen to have a rather cynical take on the demise of a Scotsman in the early middle ages: Sir Kenneth's experiences by no means reflect well on the character or career of Richard Plantagenet, who had also been far from heroic in Ivanhoe. (6) True, the culture of civility in modern life, with its commitment to the nonviolent or minimally violent resolution of social conflict, is endorsed more or less explicitly, albeit by way of the negative, in Scott's critical portrayal of the chivalric violence of the middle ages; but there is no narrative developing an account of how we got from then to the now of the early nineteenth century. Too many transitions and interruptions would have to be explained in order to defend a gradualist model of steady-state evolution; the benefits of commerce and integration do not really become a historically convincing theme until after the Restoration of 1660. The crusader novels are full of what one critic has called "carnivalesque heteroglossia," and which one might prefer to see as a variety of dictions, interests and identities that are never reconciled within a permitted space or an enduring historical formation. (7) Diversity, as we now call it, is in other words not gathered up within any emerging socio-political unit (for example a nation state) that can be imagined as containing or incorporating its components into a peaceable kingdom. Instead it persists in the form of discordant ethnic fragments unincorporated either into politically tolerant entities or into the more spontaneous harmonies of an evolving civil society. Saxon and Norman, English and Scottish factions do indeed hint at something of the accommodations to come much later in history, but even these are rudely and inefficiently sketched; the Jew and the Arab figure much more intransigently as incarnations of the other who is in the first instance (which we must soon complicate) also the enemy.

Ian Duncan has argued against any complacent endorsement of enlightenment or Whig historicism even in the Waverley novels, finding there (in Rob Roy) ...